Children and Youth;Education and Literacy;Race and Ethnicity
This indicator identifies students as on-track if they earn at least five full-year course credits and no more than one semester F in their first year of high school. On-track students are more than three and one-half times more likely to graduate from high school in four years than off-track students. The indicator is a more accurate predictor of graduation than students' previous achievement test scores or their background characteristics.
Perhaps the most important finding from this report is that failures during the first year of high school make a student much less likely to graduate. Based on their findings, the authors believe that parents and teachers should carefully monitor students' grades, especially in the first semester of freshman year, when there are still many opportunities to improve grades. Helping students make a successful transition to high school during the first semester could make students more likely to graduate.
This report also finds that on-track students are not necessarily the students with the highest achievement test scores. Many students with strong achievement fail to graduate, and many students who have demonstrated weaker achievement succeed in graduating.
Finally, this report concludes that the particular school a student attends plays a large role in whether the student is on-track. While we expect schools to have students with differing levels of preparation for high school, differences in the number of students on-track at each school remained even when the authors controlled for students' eighth-grade test scores and socioeconomic status. This suggests that school climate and structure play a significant role in whether students succeed in high school.
Schools can use the on-track indicator, which makes use of readily available data on course credits and failures, to understand what aspects of the school may be leading students to drop out.
August 1970
Geographic Focus:
Children and Youth;Education and Literacy;Race and Ethnicity
This indicator identifies students as on-track if they earn at least five full-year course credits and no more than one semester F in their first year of high school. On-track students are more than three and one-half times more likely to graduate from high school in four years than off-track students. The indicator is a more accurate predictor of graduation than students' previous achievement test scores or their background characteristics.
Perhaps the most important finding from this report is that failures during the first year of high school make a student much less likely to graduate. Based on their findings, the authors believe that parents and teachers should carefully monitor students' grades, especially in the first semester of freshman year, when there are still many opportunities to improve grades. Helping students make a successful transition to high school during the first semester could make students more likely to graduate.
This report also finds that on-track students are not necessarily the students with the highest achievement test scores. Many students with strong achievement fail to graduate, and many students who have demonstrated weaker achievement succeed in graduating.
Finally, this report concludes that the particular school a student attends plays a large role in whether the student is on-track. While we expect schools to have students with differing levels of preparation for high school, differences in the number of students on-track at each school remained even when the authors controlled for students' eighth-grade test scores and socioeconomic status. This suggests that school climate and structure play a significant role in whether students succeed in high school.
Schools can use the on-track indicator, which makes use of readily available data on course credits and failures, to understand what aspects of the school may be leading students to drop out.
August 1970
Geographic Focus:
Children and Youth;Education and Literacy;Immigration
Immigrant parents face significant barriers as they try to engage with their children's early educational experiences, including greatly restricted access for many due to limited English proficiency and functional literacy. Parental engagement is critical for young children's early cognitive and socioemotional development, and for their participation in programs that are designed to support early learning. Reducing the barriers to parent engagement in early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs would encourage school success, and help many young children of immigrants close the gaps in kindergarten readiness with their native peers.
Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the size and share of the U.S. young-child population with at least one immigrant parent, posing challenges to policymakers and front-line programs in the early childhood arena. These demographic changes are converging with efforts in many states to expand early childhood services and improve their quality. With one in four young children in the United States living in an immigrant family, efforts to build trust and establish meaningful two-way communication with these families is an urgent priority if system expansion efforts are to realize their purpose.
Many programs face difficulties engaging with immigrant and refugee parents who often require support building U.S. cultural and systems knowledge and in overcoming English language and literacy barriers. These difficulties have been exacerbated in recent years as adult basic education and English instruction programs, which early childhood programs such as Head Start had previously relied on to support parents in need of these skills, have been significantly reduced.
Against this backdrop, this report identifies the unique needs of newcomer parents across the range of expectations for parent skill, engagement, and leadership sought by ECEC programs, and strategies undertaken to address these needs. The study is based on field research in six states, expert interviews, a literature review, and a sociodemographic analysis.
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
New Teacher Center worked collaboratively with nine state coalitions - including governors, state education agencies, teacher associations, stakeholder groups and practitioners - to implement the Teaching, Empowering, Leading and Learning (TELL) survey statewide in nine states from the spring of 2012 to the spring of 2103. The TELL survey is a full-population survey of school-based licensed educators designed to report the perceptions about the presence of teaching and learning conditions that research has shown increase student learning and teacher retention.
The conditions assessed in the TELL survey include:
- Time
- Facilities and Resources
- Professional Development
- School Leadership
- Teacher Leadership
- Instructional Practices and Support
- Managing Student Conduct
- Community Support and Involvement
- New Teacher Support (for teachers in their first three years in the profession)
This report compares the results of the TELL survey at the state level across the country, providing an additional contextual lens for interpreting the results from each participating state to better understand their own findings.
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States;North America-United States (Western)-Colorado;North America-United States (Southern)-Tennessee;North America-United States (Midwestern)-Ohio;North America-United States (Southern)-North Carolina;North America-United States (Southern)-Maryland;North America-United States (Southern)-Kentucky;North America-United States (Northeastern)-Vermont;North America-United States (Northeastern)-Massachusetts;North America-United States (Northeastern)-Delaware
Education and Literacy;Parenting and Families
School choice is increasingly the new normal in urban education. But in cities with multiple public school options, how can civic leaders create a choice system that works for all families, whether they choose a charter or district public school?
To answer this question, CRPE researchers surveyed 4,000 parents in eight cities (Baltimore, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.) with high degrees of school choice. The researchers also conducted interviews with government officials, choice advocates, and community leaders in four cities, and looked at how many different agencies oversee schools in 35 cities.
The study found that:
- In the eight cities surveyed, the majority of parents are actively choosing a school for their children.
- Parents face significant barriers to choosing schools, including inadequate information, transportation, and lack of quality options.
- Challenges facing families are not confined to the charter or district sector.
- Responsibility for schools often falls to multiple parties, including school districts, charter school authorizers, and state agencies, weakening accountability and making it difficult for leaders to address the challenges facing parents.
The report finds that a more transparent, accountable, and fair system will require action from all parties, including school districts, charter authorizers, charter operators, and states. State and city leaders may need to change laws to ensure that districts and charter authorizers oversee schools responsibly and that families do not face large barriers to choice. In some cases, formal governance changes may be necessary to address the challenges to making school choice work for all families.
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
Common enrollment systems designed to manage student enrollment across district and charter sectors introduce a host of governance challenges. City charter and district leaders realize the importance of cross-sector representation when deciding policies related to enrollment, such as the number of choices families should list or whether some students will have enrollment priority over others. The question of who will administer the enrollment process once these policy decisions are made can be highly controversial. Cities that don't attend to these management questions early on risk major political fights that can stall or derail progress on the effort.
There is little precedence, nor is there a ready-made legal framework, for coordinating enrollment across sectors; how these systems will be governed and operated must instead be resolved through the collaboration of agencies, many of which have histories of competition, mistrust, and hostility. In this issue brief, we draw from a series of interviews with local education leaders in Denver, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., focusing on the governance issues that emerged as these three jurisdictions sought a cross-sector common enrollment system.
While some urban school systems have long had enrollment processes to manage choice for schools under their control, the expansion of charter schools presents a different and more complicated challenge for both parents and administrators. In many places, students no longer have a single "home district" in the traditional sense. Instead, they can now choose to enroll in the local school district or one of the city's charter schools. State charter laws give charter schools -- whether they are an independent local education agency or not -- authority over their enrollment processes; a charter school must conduct its process in a manner consistent with the law, typically a random lottery.
As charter schools grow in number, so does the number of separate enrollment systems operating across individual cities. In Denver, for example, a 2010 report showed that 60 separate enrollment systems operated in the city at the same time. Similar situations occurred in New Orleans and D.C. As individual selection processes grew to unmanageable levels in these cities, education and community leaders sought ways to rationalize and centralize student placement across an increasing number of school choices
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Western)-Colorado-Denver County-Denver;North America-United States (Southern)-Louisiana-Orleans Parish-New Orleans;North America-United States (Southern)-District of Columbia-Washington
Children and Youth;Education and Literacy;Parenting and Families
More than a decade of research shows that afterschool programs across the country are an integral support for children, families and communities. Each day after school, quality afterschool programs are keeping kids safe; inspiring them to learn; serving as a source of support and comfort to working families; and even helping working parents be more productive at work and keep their jobs.
Given the difference that afterschool programs can make for children and families, important questions about scope and demand arise: How many children are in afterschool programs? How many families want to enroll their children in an afterschool program? And how many children are unsupervised after school who are missing out on the learning opportunities afterschool programs have to offer?
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
Computers and Technology;Education and Literacy;Science
Afterschool programs around the nation have enthusiastically embraced science, technology,engineering and math (STEM). Some major afterschool providers, like 4-H and Girls Inc., have long mad eSTEM a priority and in recent years, the vast majority of providers have also come to value providing STEM learning opportunities as an important part of their programming. An Afterschool Alliance poll of afterschool programs conducted in 2010-2011 showed that 99 percent of respondents thought that offering some sort of STEM programming was important, even if that wasn't the focus of their program.
As interest and commitment to STEM learning in afterschool grows, there is an increased need for support to build the capacity of afterschool programs to offer innovative and robust STEM programming. The Afterschool Alliance poll of afterschool programs also asked respondents to describe what supports they saw as most essential. Unsurprisingly, funding was ranked as the highest need, but a close second was a desire for partnerships with STEM professionals and STEM-rich institutions, as well as more opportunities for professional development.
This issue brief illustrates the power of strong, successful partnerships between afterschool programs and STEM-rich institutions. Additionally, the partnerships described offer promising and innovative models that can have a significant impact on both students and their instructors.
December 1969
Geographic Focus:
